The streets of Prague are buzzing with rumours coming out of the work in the working groups of SC34 and SC34 itself as SC34 is currently having its plenary meeting in Prague.

It seems that SC34 has done the only clever thing to do - to create an Ad Hoc Group (AHG) to have responsibility of maintaining IS26300. I applaud the decision to do so, and it has in my view been a long time coming.

The details and scope of the group is yet to be seen, but I am glad that SC34 has chosen to create it. There is only one entity responsible for maintaining ISO standards, and that is ISO. Maintenance of IS26300 has falling between two chairs at the moment, where WG1 was initially responsible for it, but it has been preoccupied with other tasks. Also, I think the maintenance agreement of IS26300 has been mentally prohibiting any work being done.

The upside of this is that there is now a group in SC34 responsible for receiving defect reports submitted by NBs. One group is responsible for preparing reports to OASIS and the get the responses back in the ISO system.

This is a clear improvement and it is a sign and a statement that we believe that IS26300 is too important to not have a group responsible for its maintenance in ISO.

It is OASIS's intention to submit future revisions of ODF into JTC 1 as PAS submissions. This assumes the PAS procedure will still exist in its current form by the time ODF 1.2 is complete - which I'm not sure is a safe assumption.

The NBs are free to vote "No" if they do not think that the standard meets the requirements for an "international standard". I think it was Bob Sutor that made a fantastic list of non-technical reasons for voting no to a proposed standard. Maybe we should look at that list again when ODF is put on the table in JTC1.